I have a question regarding a VOIP assessment.

I'll be setting up a very small VOIP network soon. We will use the
public Internet for transport. Users will be located in New York, San
Diego, San Francisco, and France. This is for personal use only. For
various reasons we do not want to use Skype type services. I started
looking for VOIP assessment tools. These tools all seem to be for
business users and cost at least a few thousand dollars.

From a network perspective, I understand the major issues are latency,
jitter, and sufficient bandwidth. Latency can't go much beyond
200-220ms. Jitter and bandwidth seem to depend on the codec. We'd like
to be able to run a tool at periodic times to get a general baseline
of the network performance. We know this won't be a perfect VOIP
assessment but hopefully it's good enough.

1.) Is there any open source or inexpensive ($200 or less) tool out
there that can do this basic testing of jitter and latency?

2.) Could iperf with the proper configurations sufficiently model a
voice call? We looked at the possibility of a cron job running iperf.
I know iperf can measure bandwidth, jitter, and latency.

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Iperf Describes matching the packet
size to our codec to simulate a VOIP call.

We think we'd run these tests every five or ten minutes for short
bursts. This would represent a phone call. Over the course of ten days
we could then track the results to see if we could actually run VOIP
over the Internet this way.

Thank you.